


A Girl Called

by anstaar



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family, Gen, Growing up in Dark Futures, Mojoworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:54:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22721287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anstaar/pseuds/anstaar
Summary: Four people who didn't raise the mutant messiah (and one who was something else)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	A Girl Called

**Mother**

At first, Louise lets Cable hold the baby (her baby) because she doesn’t have any choice. She’s still recovering from childbirth, from being dragged across the world trying to escape from endless fights, from the destruction of the town that’d been her home (did you know, she’d asked, numb, thinking of ashes let after the fire has burned out; he hadn’t replied). She doesn’t like him much, this strange man from the future/past, from a world she had glimpsed on the news but had never really thought would intersect with her own. She doesn’t trust him, unable to stop watching him cradle her daughter in his arms, even when she’s too tired to move, when she couldn’t stop him from leaving her behind if he wished. 

Eventually, she’ll call him Nathan. It’ll come somewhere after deciding she can trust him with trying to look to her daughter’s care, even if he has no idea of what to do with a baby, and a bit before she teases him about codenames. They’ll share stories of families, his far more complicated than hers, but he’d been so ridiculously (almost charmingly) pleased to tell her his parents were from Alaska (more or less). They’ll argue over everything and she’ll announce that he better be keeping score and he’ll come up with a number, straight-faced because it turns out he does have a sense of humor under all those guns. They’ll become partners, out of necessity and by choice. It’s a long journey, but they’ll have endless hours watching out for a too fearless child. 

Maybe it starts when Nathan asks her what the baby’s name is. Louise had frozen a moment, mind blank after months of going through books with her mother and never telling her that she planned on giving the baby the name of the woman who had offered her only support and asked questions with no judgment (her mother had thought Louise had just guessed that it’d be a girl, Louise leaves it there). It’s a good name. But she had told her mother she didn’t remember the father. It’s not a lie. Maybe it was all because of a one-night stand. Before her world had crumbled, it had seemed like a much more reasonable answer than dreams of fire and light and a question asked by a winged figure (Louise doesn’t believe in angels, but late at night, once the baby had first started to move, she had flipped through the old books of Greek mythology she’d loved when she was young).

In this wasteland, pursued by a madman… Hope is a good name. Louise thinks that her mother would like it. She might even approve that it becomes Hope Spalding Summers. 

Someday they’ll go back. Once they find a way to fix the time shunter thing (yes, Nathan, she still finds the name ridiculous), they’ll go back to the world they’ve told Hope about. The two worlds. Her daughter had listened in equal fascination to tales of mutant superheroes and those of growing up in an Alaskan town. Both are equally alien to her. Until then, Louise helps teach her child how to fight. How to survive. Things she once could’ve never imagined. She doesn’t regret saying yes. 

**Father**

They call her Marian. It comes from old stories, only partly remembered but when put back together in new shapes to better fit the world they’re in – well, isn’t that the point of stories? They call her Marian, the girl in the green cloak who moves as easily in trees as she does on the ground. The rich are robbed and the poor live on and she becomes a new story to go with the one she’s named for. It’s not her only name but they all have two names, at least, those who take the X. There are names for family and for friends and to receive curses from all those they’re happy to be cursed by. 

Not many people know Marian’s other name. They all know how she got her second one, how Perry had thrown a knife and how she’d been faster with an arrow and how no one had laughed about the little girl with the bow after that. They know the stories the come after; castles broken into and escaped from, youths rescued from the hunt, that they say that Fitzroy is driven into a rage if he hears a whisper of her name. But the girl behind the stories remains elusive. 

They know of her father, though no one at all knows his first name. He’s the leader who didn’t want the job but took it anyway to watch them all. The man who’s always a little apart. There’s no X over his eye, but some things shouldn’t be changed or hidden. No matter how many years pass, he never seems fully comfortable, either in the woods that are their home or in the villages they pass through. He’s a man out of time in his own time.

Marian is part of their world, even in her elusiveness. She holds her dad’s hand and leads them both through the dark woods without a single stumble or hesitation. She’s uncomfortable in the towns, but that fits as well. She wasn’t made for such places, people say. That’s part of the story. Marian is a spirit of the woods, a foundling from a tree, a lost child who found her true home in the haven of the forest. Her dad never offers an answer to the question, she never asks him. It doesn’t matter. 

Someday they’ll go back. Bishop knows some things are inescapable, even after everything he’s managed to escape. He doesn’t know if there’s any point to this, if he made any difference, made anything better. There are people who look to him and he tries not to think of all the people he’s failed. All the people he might be failing now. But he doesn’t run from it, that a choice he made a long ago. A choice he made when he’d looked down at the baby (eyes green, even then) and named the child Hope Summers. The name of the demon from his childhood, the name of his daughter.

**Brother**

Hope’s first memory is dancing with her brother. Later she’ll realize that other people can’t dance like they can; by then, it won’t be a surprise. There are a lot of ways they aren’t like other people. Most people don’t have a brother like Nate. Nate is special. He’s special because he can dance them into different worlds and because he can see what people need and because he never ages. He’s special because he loves her and he always listens and he makes terrible jokes about how people will think she’s the _older_ sister if she’s going to look so serious. Nate says that Hope is special too. 

It’s dangerous to be special. It means that people hunt them and that they get hurt and that they have to leave people behind. It means having to run from people who look like them and worrying and wanting to change the color of her hair not to match Nate’s (not _just_ to match Nate’s) but because she see’s the people who draw back in fear when they catch sight of her from the corner of their eyes. Nate holds her tight, like when she was still so little that he had to dance alone, just carrying on her on his feet, and tells her about a woman who wasn’t the Red Queen and another woman who looked just like her and was special in the best ways. 

Hope gets to know the worlds they travel through. She walks with Nate, trying to feel only the ground under her feet. She sits by her brother and listens to him speak – to one person, to three, to a crowd; it’s not the number that matters. They play ridiculous games and make up a language that only they can understand, and Nate gives her a coat that’s far too big but that she never takes off. She’s growing into it. She’s always growing, as Nate isn’t. People doesn’t ask about the gap between their ages, anymore. Hope says it’s useful, how it helps them escape notice, because that’s the sort of thing that makes Nate laugh and say that some things are clearly genetic.

Once, when he was bleeding from a cut bad enough that Hope refused to cry so he wouldn’t try to take it as an excuse for him to not let her stich it up, she asked what made it worth it. Several years later, she realizes that Nate has been telling her the answer in the long story at bedtime that never has an ending. It’s the story of a boy made to burn up and the adventures he had and the world he had sacrificed himself for without regret. It’s about how he was brought together again with a child in his arms, and how the only thing he knew for certain in those first moments of trying to be just a person instead of _everything_ was that he had to run. It’s about hope, and Hope, and he doesn’t regret a moment of it. Except for the two years she insisted on only eating green food, he says, tugging on her hair with a grin, which he keeps even after she punches him in the shoulder. 

Someday they’ll go back. They’ll dance their way back home, once Hope is ready. They’ll find people waiting for them and a place they can stand still. Hope isn’t ready yet, can’t imagine what will make ‘home’ different, but she knows one day she will be. It’s not destiny, it’s her choice. She’s Hope Grey, and she’ll just have to figure it out. She’s faced harder tasks. 

**Sister**

Rachel names the baby Sara Summer Grey, because names are important. A name can be a link on a chain. A name can be all you have left to hold onto. She braids Sara’s hair with ribbons of purple and green and doesn’t let herself think of bruises or the last time her dad had sat with her to carefully braid her hair after the mess she’d gotten it into trying to fix it with her telekinesis, listening to her seriously as he always did. Like she thought he always would. There have been a lot of endings in her life, and even as she wants to spare Sara from them, she also wants her to have the good moments of Before to hold onto. She never wonders if her sister (not her daughter, and not just because of the mother killed with the rest of the hospital) is unusually good at sitting still for her age. ‘Usual’ isn’t a world that applies to any of this. 

In the ring, they call Sara Hope. It was born of a cruel joke, back when they were first captured by Mojo’s servants and tossed into games that no one could win. Rachel is a known factor. She had been tied up, ready for the next showing, forced to watch Mojo laugh as they set up the pre-show surprise. Hopeless, no chance of victory. But it was Sara. Sara who knew, even then, how to survive, how to _fight_ , because it wasn’t what Rachel wishes she could give but it’s been a very long time since she’s been able to believe in wishes. There had still been hope. She had known that, not just wished. And Hope survives, never gives up, darting about and putting on a show. When the airing was disrupted by rebels, there wasn’t really a question of whether they were going to help them or not. 

Rachel knows there’s no real hope, even as every part of her burns with the desire for change. She’s heard the stories (she’s been here before). Whatever it can look like, this world never truly changes. The rebels fight, and then they’re taken to fight. They remember, and then they forget. Even the Phoenix couldn’t win forever against entropy, and she’s just Rachel. But Rachel fights for change. Hope fights too (Rachel meets green eyes that don’t exactly mirror her own and doesn’t try to argue when there’s more important work for them to do instead). 

They fight and run and survive. They make friends and find places of peace (if only, if always, temporary) and live. Hope grows into a sword that really should have been too large for her, fights in sight of the cameras and knows the dazzle and darkness of the only world she’s even known in her bones. Sara sits as Rachel braids her hair and tells her stories of different worlds and the power of choice. 

Someday they’ll go back. They’ll find a way out. Perhaps the rebels will win another temporary victory. Perhaps they will fall through a crack they weren’t even looking for. Rachel doesn’t know what to expect, doesn’t know what it’ll mean. She watches her sister laugh (as she spins to cut down an enemy, as she fights another poor contestant, as she plays with the other children) and doesn’t care. 

**Other**

There’s a box in the corner of the room. Jean knows that this is only a partial truth, in the way that everything is only so true in this gradient of reality. The White Room is only one level of existence, a moment/eternity where she feels like she’s a solid presence, when she feels like _Jean_ as well as Phoenix. She’s fire. She’s life incarnate. Now and forever, she’s Phoenix. She’s also Jean Elaine Grey-Summers, with all that means and all the history that comes with it. Some days, that’s the hardest thing to be. That’s why it’s important. 

So it’s Jean sitting in the White Room (even as she’s so much more, so many more place, so many different times), practicing drawing a still life because what’s the point of being dead if you don’t work on all those things you have to put off while alive? She said she’d have time when she was dead. She can imagine her friends’ reaction to that line. She’s come up with a lot of jokes over the last – not important. Most of them probably aren’t very good, she doesn’t exactly have much of an audience to test them out on. Except for the box. 

It’s a white box, edges slightly rounded. It’s a different type of white than the room, even if it still sometimes gets lost against the walls. Or maybe sometimes it’s just not there. Jean tells the box her jokes and her memories and old stories she only remembers parts of. She runs her hands over it, looking for a latch. There’s never a latch but one day (an illusion, an imposition of a unit of time on the timeless void) she finds a crack. She sits cross-legged in front of the box, looking at the crack. It’s a change in the changeless. It probably wouldn’t need much effort to open. 

There are a lot of stories about boxes. About boxes that shouldn’t be opened. Jean had had an argument in one of her psychology classes about boxes and apples and assumptions about women. Her classmate (she can’t remember his name, not remembering unimportant things is reassuring) was lucky that she had had far too much control to throw anyone into a wall by then. She should finish that degree. She would like that. They also seriously need some more therapists at the school, there are words to be had with Charles on that score. Her sister had given her a box with popup clown. Jean had laughed. When everything is only thought, it can be hard to keep her thoughts in order. 

Jean presses her fingers against the side of the box, but she doesn’t have time to decide whether she’ll try to open it. Perhaps it was just the thought that did it. Perhaps she did have the time. The box opens (cracks). For a moment (endless, infinitesimally small), there’s nothing but light, the light that makes up everything, that pulses in Jean’s veins. 

There’s a little girl sitting cross-legged on the floor (if there’s a floor) of the White Room. She has red hair and green eyes and sometimes she’s a baby and sometimes almost a teenager and sometimes a little girl, but really, she’s all of them at once. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. Jean knows her, as she always has and always will. 

Evil wasn’t brought into the world because a woman was too curious and ruined a good thing for everyone. Jean hadn’t told the girl (the rounded box that could hold anything but always held one thing) that story. She doesn’t tell her that story now. They sit together forever, for no time at all. Jean doesn’t have time to finish her story about the red-haired girl who went away to school and found another family to hold onto in a world that needs so much before the girl leaves, but then, it doesn’t have an ending. Despite the story she never told, she whispers one last important truth as she leans forward to kiss the forehead of the child-teen-baby-woman. 

_Hope_


End file.
